Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 575

Chapter 575

ARIA

"Have you met this pack," Nina said. "On a given evening, the options for what's happening in a dark corridor are: someone is dying, someone is having feelings about someone dying, or someone is about to do something that will result in dying. We calibrate accordingly."

"Nobody is dying," I said.

"Good," Nina said. She looked between me and Killian with the expression of someone who was going to circle back to the interpretation she'd already formed. "Then what—"

"Kael told me he loved me," I said.

Nina's expression shifted. The warmth recalibrated into something more precise.

"That's good," she said, carefully. "Isn't it."

"I kept telling him he'd never said it," I said. "So he said it. And I asked if he meant it. And he said—" I stopped.

"What did he say," Jordan said.

"He said I'd told him to say it," I said.

The path was quiet.

Nina and Jordan looked at each other with the rapid silent communication of people who'd been doing this for two decades.

"Kael," Jordan said, with the specific tone of a man who'd been compiling documentation on someone's emotional management failures for years and had just received a new entry.

"He really—" Nina started.

"Yes," I said.

"Wow," Jordan said.

"He messed that up," Nina said. She said it with the flatness of accurate assessment rather than condemnation. "That was genuinely bad."

"I know he didn't mean it the way it came out," I said, before they could go further down that path. "I know that. But it's also not — it's not the only thing. He's my fated mate and he's in love with Ivory and I can see it and I can't even—" I stopped. "I can't be angry. That's the thing. Ivory isn't doing anything wrong. He isn't doing anything wrong. There's just this whole history and this whole love and I walked into the middle of it and I'm supposed to be building something with him but his heart was already somewhere when I arrived."

Nina looked at me.

Then she did something I wasn't expecting.

She sat down. On the path. Not on a bench — on the ground, the way Kael had sat on the floor of Killian's room, the way this inner circle apparently processed difficult things when chairs weren't available.

Jordan sat down beside her.

After a moment, I sat down.

Killian sat down beside me.

Four people on a path in the dark.

"Jordan and I are fated mates," Nina said.

I looked at her.

"We've been together since before the curse," she said. "Long before. We were together before we knew about the fated bond. The bond came later and we just—it confirmed what was already there."

"I didn't know," I said.

"We don't show it," Jordan said. "Especially in the inner circle context. The work is the work."

"Kael and Ivory don't know," Nina said.

I processed this. Looked at Jordan. Back at Nina.

"Why not," I said.

Nina was quiet for a moment.

"How do you tell them," she said. "We got the thing they wanted. We got the easy version — together before the curse, together through it, the bond was there and we had it and it worked out." She looked at her hands. "Ivory will be happy for us. I know she will. But she'll be happy for us from a specific place that has grief in it, because we have what she was supposed to have, and I don't—" she paused. "I don't want to put that on her."

"And Kael," Jordan said. "He sealed a wall in his own quarters because he couldn't walk past the door. He's been—he's integrating, he's trying, he's choosing Aria, we can all see it. But telling him that his security chief and his intelligence lead have what he and Ivory were supposed to have—" he shook his head. "The timing hasn't been right."

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